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Monday, March 26, 2012

At What Price The Stars?

Colonel Damian Slant strode through the double doors of Highlands Grove Elementary School hoping he could pull today off without his serious misgivings spilling out.

This was all an elaborate sham. False credentials showed him to be a minor functionary of the World Health Organization. The "Discovery Testing", supposedly verifying the efficacy of the children's required inoculations, was something far more insidious.

During the mission brief, he'd joked it must be time to "pay the Alien Overlord piper". His superiors hadn't been amused. The Ralshandrans, they insisted, had only Humanity's best interests in mind. The opportunities they promised were certainly worth some reciprocal faith on Mankind's part.

When the Ralshandrans insisted that the price for inclusion was that humans become a sturdier and more adept species, it only made sense to accept that premise. If this advancement could be induced in less than a generation, by introducing undetectable compounds to the water supply, wasn't that all the better?

His orders were quite simple: Confirm the presence of the genetic precursors of "the change" in the subjects' blood and report the findings. Slant couldn't shake the feeling that, whatever the tests might reveal, nothing would ever be simple ever again.